Category: Tips

According to Joe Pulizzi at the Content Marketing Institute, the world’s oldest “blog post” arguably dates back to 4200 BCE, when a cave painting was found that can be read as “6 ways a spear can save you from a wild boar.”

That painting probably offered life-saving information to the boar hunters of the day. Of course, a cave wall has a fraction of the reach today’s digital world does — yet too much content created today ends up in the Web equivalent of a cave because its publishers lack a content distribution plan.

According to Jodi Harris at CMI, 62 percent of the most successful content was backed by a content marketing plan, while only 16 percent of the least successful content had a marketing plan behind it.

“Without a content distribution strategy, even the most creative, innovative, and groundbreaking content may never be discovered,” Dawn Papandrea wrote in a 2016 article for NewsCred. This simple statement of fact is at the heart of the content distribution problem. It is also the reason a content distribution plan is essential.

Map the Territory

One easy way to find answers to these questions is by building buyer personas, according to Marcia Riefer Johnston at CMI. Buyer personas help you get a sense of your target audience members as people, making it easier to predict the best ways to reach them.

This process can also help you identify previously unexplored channels for creating content. For instance, if your target audience spends a great deal of its time watching tutorials or TED Talks on YouTube, you’ll want to branch into video content, says Heidi Cohen.

Clare McDermott also recommends looking for ways to differentiate content early so that your message stands out. Differentiation is especially important when your product or service has a wide range of potential competitors.

Map Your Offerings

Just what are you distributing?

Content on scattershot topics will likely have a scattershot effect when it’s distributed. At a minimum, keeping track of its widely varying keywords and hashtags will dilute your focus and, ultimately, your brand.

Instead, Natasha Hoke, marketing manager at Upscope, recommends focusing content (both creation and distribution) around “topic clusters.” Topic clusters use a central page linked to several related content items, covering a single topic in depth with a set of closely related keywords, hashtags and similar organizational elements.

Betsy MacLeod at Blue Corona recommends an alternate strategy: Map the content you plan to distribute according to the “See, Think, Do, Care” model. Each work corresponds to a different stage in the buyer’s journey.

By targeting both the content and its distribution to the right stage for your audience, you can reach the right people in the right time at the right way for the results you seek.

Go Where the People Are

Your audience’s profile can help you narrow down the best types of content to develop and the best places to distribute it. But audience profiles won’t answer every question.

For instance: How should you balance paid and unpaid distribution channels?

Paid distribution channels include ad networks, paid social media and native advertising, all of which partner your company with a publisher to provide content for their audience, as Instapage notes.

Paid channels can be a good way to get a foot in the door when starting to distribute content, but it’s best to use money strategically while seeking to grow content in other ways, says Papandrea.

Otherwise, your numbers will drop dramatically every time a paid campaign ends.

Like paying other kids on the playground to be your friend, paying for content distribution can make you feel popular in the short term, but it doesn’t build relationships in the long term.

Fortunately, unpaid distribution options rule the Internet, with options abounding. Social media, genre-specific content platforms like YouTube and SlideShare, crowdsourcing audience participating, focusing on SEO, guest blogging and nurturing leads by distributing content directly to relevant business prospects are all ways to get noticed without spending cash on advertising, notes Stacy Jackson at ClearVoice.

These tactics can be remarkably easy. Consider one of our key distribution strategies: Targeting influencers. These are the people quoted by name in any piece of content. There are 14 such people in this post. When it goes live, we will reach out to them individually to let them know we have featured their thoughts in a piece of content. If they like what we’ve written, they are encouraged to share it. This type of PR-style outreach can be a very effective approach to reach and grow a broader audience.

Further, consider distributing in-house first. James Haslam, content manager at Adjust, started distributing content within the young SaaS company by sending emails to everyone on the team. The result? Ten times more shares, on average, for each created piece. When content is in the hands of your staff, they can use it in highly targeted ways as they work with customers and contacts from day to day.

Social Media Distribution Plan: Why and How

Facebook’s ad page claims that the site hosts 900 million unique visitors each day. According to YouTube’s 2018 statistics, the site has 1.3 billion users, with 30 million visiting each day. Instagram’s blog boasts about its 500 million users, 300 million of whom check Instagram each day.

These major social channels are powerhouse places to distribute content — but what they offer in visibility, they lack in specificity. “The challenge for marketers is to understand how their audiences are viewing content on these platforms, and target them appropriately,” Thomas Barnes at Pixability tells us.

Once marketers find the right niche on the big sites, they “must also carefully monitor their campaigns and adjust throughout the flight toward the targeting parameters and creative assets that are resonating with their target audience,” he says.

It helps to get excited about branching out, too. “You can’t solely rely on Google or Facebook for all your traffic,” Sherry Bonelli writes at Search Engine Land. “You need to get traffic from a variety of sources: paid media, niche channels, online directories, user groups, social communities, forums, social media, and so on.”

Do More With Your Existing Content

Bonelli also recommends refreshing the content you already have. For instance, blog posts can be combined or converted into short ebooks, opening up distribution options and creating lead magnets for mailing lists and other distribution channels. Many blog posts also make great video scripts and infographic outlines.

Entrepreneur Myk Pono notes you can also recycle content without changing its genre. For instance, an article on the top three challenges faced by your customers’ companies in the coming year might contain two or three points that would each make their own article. With a bit of editing, the same article might thrive on multiple text-based channels.

When you do create new content, don’t hesitate to schedule multiple re-shares of the same or similar links, videos or images. “Given the fast-paced nature of our social feeds, hyping up your latest post multiple times is totally fair game,” Brent Barnhart writes at Sprout Social. “Simply switch up your captions, hashtags and imagery to keep from parroting yourself to your followers.”

Your offerings are outstanding, your marketing strategy is sound and your content is part of the conversation — yet your numbers don’t reflect the kind of deal-closing relationship you want to have with your customer base.

If this sounds familiar, it might be time to consider teaming up and using brand partnerships to boost your content marketing.

Just as an introduction from a trusted common friend can help you be more trusted by a new acquaintance, introducing your brand through shared content with another brand can help that audience trust you more. “It’s been shown that average people (like you and me) trust influencers’ opinions nearly as much as our friends’ and families’ opinions,” Chris Ake writes at Forbes.

Here, we look at how strategic brand partnerships are built and how to use yours to improve the quality and reach of your content.

What Can Brand Partnerships Do For Your Business?

In a strategic brand partnership, two or more companies work together to create value — and to spread the word of that enhanced value to every participants’ target audience, as Gregory Pollack notes at MarketingProfs.

“For a true strategic partnership brand marketing program to work, both brands must complement each other and deliver similar customer profiles,” Pollack writes. “Even more importantly, the partnership must sit within the lifestyle and user experience of the customer.”

Partnership brand marketing isn’t a new idea. As Christian Daugstrup at Thunderbrand points out, one of the best-known examples of a brand partnership is the cereal box with a branded toy inside. The combination boosts sales of both the cereal and the toy, making both companies happier.

In the digital era, marketing partnerships look a bit different. Not only are the products or services often less tangible than a box of cereal and a toy, but companies are no longer limited to partnering to distribute the product or service itself. They can partner to distribute content, too.

Brand Partnerships for Content Marketing: Key Considerations

Today, many consumers are already loyal to the brands they love, and the anonymizing influence of social media — where consumers can curate the content they see — can make it tough to break into new markets.

This tough field is where content marketing partnerships shine. Natalie Staines, director of marketing at r2i, recommended using brand partnerships to generate leads. “When one target audience is totally saturated, leveraging another brand, and the peer influence of its followers, is an almost necessary means to an end,” Staines says. Partnering with the right brand can help your company reach an audience that thinks it’s not interested in new content — until it sees what you have to offer.

Pay attention to the audience. Different customer groups respond differently to different forms of social media, content and accessing options. For instance, Chris Wilson at GMA notes that age is a huge determiner of the success of a digitally based loyalty program. Make sure your partner is targeting the same demographics you are in ways that work for that audience.

Know your own needs. “Before getting to the tactics on a content partnership, it is important to understand the business need that is driving the partnership,” Demand Media’s Felicia Alexander tells Scribble Live. “Are you looking to attract a new audience, increase time on site, drive new sales?” Seek partners who can help you meet your needs just as you help the partner meet theirs.

For many companies, the dream partner is a brand that meets their every criteria for an ideal partnership — and who feels entirely out of their league. Too often, the result is a partnership that can never succeed because it is never made.

“I think some people are afraid to ask for help from other content creators,” says Jess Ostroff, managing editor at Convince & Convert. “They see it as invasive, pushy, or they’re not confident enough in their own content to be willing to share it.”

To solve this problem, Ryan Kettler at BootSuite recommends doing three things:

Read the blog posts and comments at potential partners’ sites to understand their audience and whether you can contribute to the conversation with that audience.

Stock your own content channels with quality information that adds to the conversation.

Offer valuable content with a creative twist or voice that’s all your own.

Once you find the right partner, Kettler recommends being thoughtful, reliable and promotional. Collaborate for results that help both partners, keep your promises and promote your collaborative content as thoroughly as you would your own.

Above all, be authentic. “I try to be as natural as I can on first-time calls,” says HubSpot’s Christine White. “This gives the potential partner a sense of my personality … it loosens the vibe and allows for a more relaxed conversation, which means you can really get to know each other and your goals.”

Case Studies: Outstanding Content Marketing Partnerships

Another way to ensure you’re building a solid strategy for a branded content marketing partnership is to analyze the success of other online brand partnerships. Here are some examples of content marketing partnerships done well.

1. National Geographic and Tourism New Zealand

National Geographic and Tourism New Zealand teamed up to provide “The Ultimate New Zealand Experience,” featuring video directed by Bryce Dallas Howard. The combination allows Tourism New Zealand to leverage National Geographic’s reputation for stunning visuals and thoughtful coverage of the natural world and current events, reaching an audience that might not otherwise have thought of New Zealand as a rich cultural getaway.

2. Vox and Spotify

In a partnership that only exists in the digital world, Vox and Spotify teamed up to create “The Secret to Your Discover Playlist? A Cyborg Approach.” Consumers who love Vox’s deep dives into obscure topics are drawn into the details of obscure 1970s synth-funk, while those who love Spotify enjoy learning more about exactly how the app’s Discover Weekly tool works.

3. Visit Seattle and Sundance TV

When you’re already committed to creating audiovisual works with a short film feel, there’s no better place to show them off than to a film-obsessed audience. Enter Visit Seattle’s collaboration with Sundance TV, “Five by Five.” In it, the Visit Seattle spots take on the feel of short documentaries. Each was shot in a single day and emphasizes the storytelling dynamic of film over the selling point of the city in a way that nevertheless makes both points unforgettable.

4. The Wall Street Journal and Chase

Financial mainstays like The Wall Street Journal and Chase would seem, at first, to have everything going for them when it comes to being a household name. Yet the two established a partnership to speak to a younger audience with “Inside the Moment,” a digital visual experience that allows visitors to explore 360-degree views of San Francisco, New Orleans and Miami. Each features deep dives into those cities’ iconic neighborhoods. The result is a lush yet approachable feel that underscores the value of smart finance.

5. Fatherly and Airbnb

Content site Fatherly provides parenting insights and advice; space-sharing company Airbnb wants to encourage travelers to find the perfect destination. The two paired up in “This Photographer Proves a Quick Family Getaway Can Become an Uncharted Adventure,” a photo essay in which Airbnb locations provide the backdrop for a family’s weekend trip up the Oregon coast, discovering that “it’s best to vacation like you live there.”

Takeaways for Marketing Directors

Why do each of these examples stand out? They combine two brands with overlapping audiences and a shared vision — and they do it in a way that not only informs but inspires.

As inspirational content continues to grab the attention of viewers, the best strategy for boosting content may be to seek out brand partnerships that inspire, too.

For years, companies have focused their online content marketing on text-based searches. What do people type when they’re looking for a product or service like ours, they ask, and how do we capture those phrases in a way search engine algorithms notice?

As voice search tools like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Voice Assistant have become more convenient and intuitive, however, customers use them more often — and they’ve changed the way they phrase queries to account for the voice-activated nature of the search tool.

Here, we look at how the move from text to voice search is changing our approach to content, and how to make changes that will capture both voice and text searchers.

How Voice Search is Changing Our Approach to Content

Voice-activated search tools are pervading our homes and workplaces. Studies estimate that by 2022, more than half of US households will have a voice-activated speaker device, according to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch.

But the biggest voice device expected to change the way we search is the smartphone. In mid-2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that 20 percent of mobile queries were voice-based.

The numbers have grown since, making voice search ever more commonplace and affecting which results rise to the top of those searches.

To complicate matters further for content teams, every device uses a different search engine or combination of search engines from which to draw knowledge, according to Britney Muller at the Content Marketing Institute. For instance, Google Home and Google Voice Assistant both use Google’s data, Siri and Cortana rely on Bing, and Alexa defaults to a combination of Bing and Amazon data.

There’s still no single strategy that will optimize content for every voice device. Focusing content on the way the use of voice changes both the query and the response, however, can help your content rise to the top of voice search results.

Make Keywords Conversational

Text-based searches tend to cut a query down to its most important words. Voice-based searches, by contrast, are structured much more similarly to the way we speak.

“If I were to approach an employee in a pet food store, I wouldn’t typically ask ‘best pet food dog?’” Angus Ewart writes at Small Business BC. Instead, the question would be phrased as “What is the best pet food for my dog?” or “What dog food do you recommend?”

When voice search first debuted, it had a much harder time with recognizing speech and matching it to relevant answers. Voice search’s word error rate was over 20 percent six years ago, but is eight percent or less today, AJ Agarwal writes at Forbes. This means that content marketing teams don’t have to account for misspoken or misinterpreted words anymore — but they do still need to account for the many ways that people might voice a particular question.

Crucial Context That Voice Searches Provide

The good news? Good keyword research has always been about putting a human reader first, says Julia McCoy at the Content Marketing Institute, and good keyword research for voice search optimization is no different.

Optimizing keywords for voice search starts by collecting keywords that surround a target word or phrase. To find the target, consider which questions your customers might ask that would lead them to your company. Don’t skip the question words: Uses of “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how” jump dramatically when a query moves from text to speech, says Neil Patel.

Voice search also demands optimization for long-tail keywords, Susannah Noel writes at Clariant Creative. Traditionally, keywords have been short, as the majority of text-based searches are only two to three words long, Purna Virji at Microsoft points out. Voice-based searches, however, are often longer; they’re less likely to be two words and more likely to be longer than four words.

These wordy questions provide valuable context about the searcher’s needs, interests and goals, Ian Kelley writes at Vital. That context is often missing from text-based searches. For that reason, much content aimed at capturing text searchers often skips that context, too.

For instance, Kelley notes, a text search for “best laptops for college students” doesn’t indicate on what basis the searcher wants to determine what’s “best.” Articles and blog posts written to target this phrase may choose their own “bests,” which may not match the customer’s interests.

By contrast, “What are the best-priced laptops for college students?” is a request for comparisons based on cost, which a voice search can more easily provide — and which content marketers can more thoughtfully target.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel to Accommodate These Searches

Does this mean you need to write new content for every long-tail variation on every question that might bring voice searchers to your website? Not necessarily. Brian Dean at Backlinko analyzed 10,000 voice queries and responses to discover that very few voice results had the exact words of the query in their title tag. “Therefore, creating individual pages for each voice search query doesn’t appear to be an effective voice search SEO strategy,” Dean says.

Instead, adapting existing content to address some of the most common long-tail questions may be more effective than dashing off a new, unoriginal piece of work for every possible combination of words — especially since the average word count on a voice search results page was 2,312 words, according to Amanda Zantal-Wiener at HubSpot.

Turning existing content into value-packed longform content may do far more for voice search results than creating endless streams of new pages.

Get Specific

Fifteen percent of new Google voice searches every day are for combinations of words that haven’t been Googled before, according to Heather Horton at Ecrubox Digital. That’s because the use of spoken language changes the way we phrase queries — and the contexts in which we make them.

A Google case study revealed that most voice search queries share three common elements:

They’re more likely than text queries to be about an action-based, on-the-go topic. Think users looking for store hours or directions to a specific location. In fact, one in three mobile searches are local in nature, according to DialogTech’s Christie Huber.

They’re less likely than text queries to deal with sensitive information.

They don’t include searches for sites or information that require user interaction, like an online catalog.

In addition to understanding what people ask in voice searches (and keywording accordingly), understanding how those questions are asked — on the go, impersonally, with a quick response in mind — can help companies structure their content to provide the response searchers are looking for, says Elizabeth Bush at the Enveritas Group.

When the “how” aspect of questions is understood, the “how” of answers can be improved. Dean’s Backlinko study found that short and simple was the way to go: On average, voice search results were 29 words long and were written at a 9th grade reading level.

Finally, as Tom Salvat notes at Concured, specificity can help companies rise to the top of voice search results — and the top is where companies need to be, since voice-based search engines typically read only the first result aloud to the user.

Prioritize Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the parts of a result that Google Home and Google Assistant read aloud in response to a voice search query. In addition to reading the information aloud, Google’s tools also typically cite the name of the website that provided the result, making featured snippets a powerful tool for putting your brand in front of potential customers, Bryson Meunier writes at Search Engine Land.

Unsurprisingly, information on how to create solid featured snippets has gotten a great deal more attention in recent months. Tips for creating content that lands in the featured snippet spot from Julia McCoy, again, at the Content Marketing Institute include:

Answer the questions readers are asking. “How does,” “how to” and “what is” queries commonly result in featured snippet responses.

Make your answer short and to the point. Content that doesn’t answer the question won’t get the featured snippet.

Create high-quality longform content. Featured snippets use the same ranking system as the rest of Google, so quality content is a must. Strive to offer the best answer available.

Finally, stay on top of Google’s news on featured snippets. The company published a guide to featured snippets in early 2018, authored by Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for speech. This guide provides excellent insights from the search engine itself.

In addition to targeting Google’s featured snippet option, optimizing short pieces of content for other platforms, like Bing-based Siri and Alexa, is becoming easier. Schema’s “speakable” extension, set for rollout in late 2018, will allow website owners to indicate snippets of text that are particularly suited to being read aloud by voice assistants, giving content creators the ability to indicate to voice systems what they should read to users.

Why It’s Time to Befriend Voice Search in Content Marketing

Voice search use continues to grow as users discover its accessibility and speed mesh well with their needs. Adapting content to incorporate voice considerations can make it more closely match natural speech, read more engagingly and provide clearer, more concise answers — all of which puts that content, and your company, front and center of search results.

Further “is a once-a-week email that helps you maximize your health, wealth, and personal growth.”

What do all these sites have in common? Their primary focus is delivering a particular type of newsletter: the curated content newsletter.

Here, we’ll explore how curated content newsletters work, why they succeed (or fail), and how any organization can create and scale a curated content newsletter that grabs attention and builds a following.

The Evolution of Curated Content Newsletters

News roundups delivered via email sound so quaint, don’t they? After all, this was one of the earliest email marketing tactics developed.

And yet some companies are building major businesses by refreshing this decades-old marketing tactic.

The best curated content newsletters today are able to sift through the noise of the Internet to pick out the best content on a given topic, says Demian Farnworth at Copyblogger. The newsletter organizes the content, packages it into an email and fires it off to an audience that wants high-quality information without having to search for it themselves.

On paper, that sounds just like old-school news roundups. And to be sure, newsletters in general remain a popular way to build a following and retain customers. In 2017, 83 percent of B2B marketers were using email newsletters as part of their overall content marketing strategy, according to Joe Pulizzi and Ann Handley at the Content Marketing Institute. In addition, 74 percent of B2B marketers saw these newsletters as part of their overall strategy to make personal connections with customers.

But newsletters can be a tough sell in 2018 — especially to ourselves. “We don’t like the newsletters we receive nor do we get anything out of them,” says Pia Silva at Forbes, “so we resist creating our own email marketing campaigns in fear of being that meaningless content dribbling into others inboxes that we dislike so much ourselves. Why would we want to do that to anyone?”

What makes curated content newsletters like theSkimm so fascinating is that they’ve taken a concept we’ve learned to resist, the newsletter, and turned it into something engaging, exciting, even anticipated. And they’ve done it not by creating brand new content, but by collecting top-notch work from other sources.

How have these newsletters done so well when “newsletter” is a word many content marketers avoid? Brain+Trust Partners CEO Scott Monty says the top elements of a top newsletter today include a clever, colloquial tone, a passionate focus and great design.

Below, we will see how the combination of focus and smart presentation have created a new generation of great newsletters.

How These Curated Content Newsletters Are Knocking It Out of the Park

Some curated content newsletters have become household names. How did they do it? We dove into interviews and comments from their creators to find out.

1. Further

Further is the brainchild of Brian Clark, the founder and CEO of Copyblogger.

Clark discussed Further in depth on the Rainmaker FM podcast during its development in 2014. “What I’m seeing though is there is a lot of good content in just about any topical area you could think of,” Clark told Rainmaker’s Robert Bruce. “There really is an opportunity here because you can still build an audience as long as you are creating the value. Here you are creating the value by finding the best, eliminating the dreck and sending that to people.”

One tip Clark offered on the podcast was to choose the intersection of two topics to serve as the foundation of a curated content newsletter. Copyblogger itself provides an example of this approach: It’s a site that focuses on the intersection between copywriting and blogging.

2. NextDraft

NextDraft is a daily email (and an iOS app) through which its creator, Dave Pell, sends the day’s top news stories to readers. “Each morning I visit about 75 news sites, and from that swirling nightmare of information quicksand, I pluck the top ten most fascinating items of the day,” Pell writes on NextDraft’s website, “which I deliver with a fast, pithy wit that will make your computer device vibrate with delight.”

This sort of humor is exactly what NextDraft’s readers love about the curated newsletter. “Every issue feels like the author sat down and put his heart and soul into a single email and then sent it out to you, and you only,” writer Veselina Gerova says.

Patrick Armitage at HubSpot agrees: The key to NextDraft’s success is how the newsletter feels personal, he says. Armitage praises NextDraft for its personality and conversational feel. “I don’t just want a bunch of browsable links,” Armitage says, “I want to know why I should read this stuff, and how it pertains to me.”

Pell’s approach does exactly that, creating a curated content newsletter that feels like it’s building a relationship, not merely dumping information on readers.

3. theSkimm

theSkimm launched in 2012 through the joint efforts of Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin. In an interview with Marie Forleo, Weisberg and Zakin discussed how “it was their ignorance – not their connections, their investors or dumb luck – that helped them unlock an idea that had never been done before.”

Pre-Skimm, Zakin and Weisberg worked at NBC News, where they soon realized that friends were always asking them about the day’s news. “They never watched what we produced but always wanted to know what was going on,” Zakin told Cosmopolitan.

With $4,000, Zakin and Weisberg started the curated content newsletter to help people be more informed about world events — and readers wanted what theSkimm offered. By 2018, theSkimm had 6.5 million subscribers.

The founders’ advice? Use your lack of knowledge about other people’s systems to your advantage — and always find new ways to think about what it is you do. As Emily Stanford notes at Salesforce, one of theSkimm’s early successes was understanding how closely the need for quick news updates was tied to watching the calendar, and responding with a paid app option that coordinated with the user’s calendar accordingly.

Another way theSkimm’s founders frame their work is in terms of attention. “We are very much in the attention economy game,” Weisberg said in 2016. “To say we get 5 minutes of everyone’s day when they’re laying in bed in the morning is something we’re very proud of.”

Creating and Scaling a Curated Content Newsletter

About 2.25 million blog posts are published each day, according to Worldometer’s daily analysis. That’s a lot of reading.

Here’s how to find the ones worth compiling into a curated content newsletter — and how to build a newsletter that your subscribers will read:

Define Your Topic

Readers subscribe to curated content newsletters because they’re interested in specific topics. They want the best information on that topic, and they want it quickly.

Curate With Intention

“Curation is more than packaging,” says Maria Popova at Brainpicker. “It is to help readers (discern) what is important in the world.” To help readers determine what information is important, you will first need to decide for yourself which information matters.

When curating, less is more. “Curation done well really is a service to readers that they’ll thank you for,” said Mark Walker at CMWorld.

Organize

Generalized idea-organizing tools like Google Drive and Evernote have long been used to curate newsletter content. But as interest in curated newsletters has grown, specialized apps for the job have emerged, as well, writes Kevan Lee at Buffer.

In addition to organizing the great articles, videos, infographics and other items you find, you’ll also need a way to organize them into the final newsletter. Here, attention to factors like the type of content being presented, the audience/need focus, and the new value being generated by the curation process will pay off, says digital media analyst Robin Good.

Design and Send

A wide range of tools are available for creating and managing newsletters, including several that focus specifically on curated content newsletters. And while other tools for curating and sharing content exist, email remains a strong contender.

“Email is still the killer app,” NextDraft’s Pell told The Verge in a 2012 interview. “It looks great on all your devices and the user experience is always exactly what you’ve come to expect.” Given the millions of subscribers to the top curated newsletters, Pell’s 2012 claim appears to be just as true in 2018 as it was six years before.

But don’t overlook design. As Sarah Burley notes at Creative Bloq, email newsletters that are plain or hard to read get deleted. “The unsubscribe button is seeming more and more tempting by the minute,” said Burley of these newsletters.

Instead, invest some attention into a newsletter that’s as nice to look at as it is fun to read. Tools available to help boost your design include:

Free graphic design tools like Canva, which can help you build a uniform look for your newsletter, social media posts and website.

The ability to see your design in any browser, thanks to tools like Litmus.

From Facebook Live to Periscope to IGTV, live video streaming has gained major momentum in the last several months — and not just among individuals who enjoy playing with the latest social media craze.

Brands are launching into the live video space, as well, in order to build awareness, converse with customers and share everything they have to offer.

Here, we look at the why and how of live video marketing: Why brands need to embrace it and how to make it work for you.

Why Live Video Is Important Right Now

Video is one of the most-consumed forms of media online today. Marcus Sheridan at Social Media Examiner estimates that by next year 80 percent of what we consume online will be media content. The rise in video content in 2018 suggests that Sheridan’s estimate may be right on track.

More than 1 billion people use YouTube, making it the world’s second-largest search engine behind parent company Google.

45 percent of YouTubers watch more than an hour of video a week.

82 percent of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter, even though it is a primarily text-based platform.

According to TJ McCue at Forbes, live video marketing is poised to account for 13 percent of all video streamed in 2018, and the share of live video will keep rising as the amount of total overall streamed content rises. Meanwhile, 64 percent of customers are more likely to buy an item online once they’ve seen a video about it, says Matt Bowman at Forbes, so brands have plenty of incentive to keep producing video.

Live video is especially good at grabbing the attention of younger viewers: Among Internet users younger than 35, half say they watch live video online, according to Madeline Vuong at the Garrigan Lyman Group.

Video isn’t just popular; it’s preferred. Over half (53 percent) of potential customers want to see more video content from marketers, according to Lindsay Kolowich at HubSpot. Nearly the same percentage (51.9 percent) of marketing professionals say that video has the best ROI of every type of content they use. That means there are supply-side incentives and demand-side incentives for companies to create more video content.

The upswing in ROI awareness may be directly related to the increase in the use of video as a marketing tool. While only 24 percent of companies used video in 2015, today that number has risen to 87 percent, according to Outbrain. And 95 percent of marketers are entering the live video world this year, according to Mike O’Brien at ClickZ.

The other big thing that makes live video so appealing: FOMO.

The fear of missing out is what make live video feel suspenseful, special and appealing, says Krystal Overmyer at Skyword. Combined with our natural human curiosity, it makes live video psychologically appealing to a wide range of customers. We want to know what’s going on, and we feel disappointed if we’re not included.

How to Create a Strategy for Your Live Video Marketing

If you are ready to dive into live video as a content format, follow these four tips below.

1. Choose Content That Aligns With Your Marketing Goals

There are dozens of different forms of content that can be produced via live video, often with effects you won’t get from any other form of content. Single Grain’s Eric Siu recommended several of these, including interactive customer service, product demonstrations, FAQ sessions and even opt-in focus groups.

Where should you place live video in your marketing funnel? According to Luria Petrucci at Livestreaming Pros, the answer is “anywhere.” Tawanna B. Smith at MGT Travel Media agrees — and notes that live video can be a powerful tool for engaging and converting potential customers, since it couples the closeness of real-time human interaction with the fear of missing out.

2. Plan, But Don’t Overproduce

Jay Baer at Convince & Convert recommends having a general plan in mind for your live broadcasts, but not to go overboard. “Brands are afraid of being imperfect,” Baer said, but the real value of live video is in giving audiences a more authentic, real-time version of the companies and brands that interest them.

Sylvain Gauchet, cofounder of Apptamin and App2Video, says “The first thing to do is to plan it. You can’t just plug in your device and start capturing footage” — especially when that footage is being broadcast live.

Instead, Gauchet recommends outlining the scenario for the video, and then using the outline as a general guide. Be willing to deviate from the outline when it’s clear there’s a better story elsewhere. Early video streaming adopter Brian Fanzo told Baer that it’s important to go “where the participants wanted to go” — as Fanzo did in one live session where he changed his discussion on the fly from a backstage tour to answering questions about the Samsung phone he was using to film.

But while video is increasingly in demand, many companies shy away from it due to its production-heavy demand. “Despite the low barrier to producing a video (a smartphone and free editing software), it’s still very difficult to achieve a final product that’s an effective marketing piece,” Dennis Balgavy at Britton says.

Conversion from viewers. How many people follow through on the livestream’s call to action?

Attention span. Who dropped out when, and can you determine why?

Post-livestream views. Who tunes in after the fact, when, and how do they find the video?

Other useful metrics may include MQLs generated, employee engagement or influencers who enter your pipeline. MacMaster recommends choosing the metrics that are most relevant to your goals.

4. Before You Broadcast, Promote!

It’s tough for audiences to tune in live if they don’t know when, where or how to do so.

Encourage them to tune in by using livestreaming platforms’ built-in schedulers, Sophie Fitzpatrick at EdgyLabs recommends, and by posting the URL to your social channels in the days before the big event.

Sneak previews can also help you grab attention and tap into that important fear of missing out that drives naturally curious humans to click on live video.

Case Studies: Brands Using Live Video to Impress Us With Content Marketing

Several early adopter brands are standouts in the live video marketing world — and many who have just embraced the technology are starting to shine, as well.

In February 2016, Dunkin’ Donuts put itself at the front of the live video marketing trend by giving a live tour of its facilities via Facebook Live. The tour included a peek into the brand’s test kitchen and interviews with its staff experts, who provided insider information about some of the brand’s most popular treats and drinks. The video even included a visit to the company’s donut factory. And by leaving the video on its Facebook page after the event ended, Dunkin’ Donuts continues to accumulate views and visitors, turning a live event into a powerful piece of content years later.

While live sports will always make for good live video content, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is using livestreaming as a brand-building tool, not merely a distribution channel, according to Aaron Agius. UFC’s Fightpass, which Agius describes as “a Netflix for fight fans,” gives fans access not only to livestreamed events, but also to live video of press conferences, live interviews with fighters and other participants, and even coverage of combat sports from other organizations.

Live video makes it easier to cross or combine genres for greater creativity, as well. Irene Enriquez Chan at belive.tv describes one of that platform’s users who has discovered the value of live video streaming to showcase her work. “She calls [her videos] the ‘live image reveal,’” Chan tells us. “Due to her interactive live shows, she’s able to establish herself as an expert and she gets more inquiries about her photography services.”

To succeed at live video content marketing, keep it loose, keep it honest and know how you’ll measure the video’s success when you go in. Then, create!

The call to action. It’s your bottom line. The reason you brought eyeballs to your page. The only thing you really want visitors to do.

So why are so many CTAs just plain bad?

Seventy percent of B2B blog posts and Web pages contained no call to action at all five years ago, according to Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends. That number has decreased somewhat over time, but for many businesses an increase in quantity doesn’t mean an increase in quality.

Here, we’re going to break down the biggest reasons CTAs fail, the best ways to avoid these mistakes and what tools you can use to create calls to action that attract better prospects.

Ugh: The Top Reasons CTAs Fail

“Getting prospective customers to do what you want them to do can be like herding cats,” Dan Shewan writes at WordStream. “They abandon shopping carts before checking out, they don’t sign up for your beautifully written newsletter, and they don’t even have the common courtesy to read your blog posts all the way to the end [editor’s note: ahem].”

A good call to action, however, can give that herd of cats some direction. It can focus the attentions of your visitors and give them clear next steps.

But bad CTAs do the opposite: They drive people away.

Here’s how too many of them do it:

1. They’re Too Vague

“Buy now,” “Submit” and “Click here” are three of the most popular calls to action online today — partly because they’re also the default language in a number of website-building tools.

They’re also deadly vague. Buy what now? Submit to whom and for what purpose? Click here for what?

In a world of increasing privacy and security concerns, where nearly every Internet user has been burned by a virus at least once, this kind of vagueness doesn’t cause excitement. It causes wariness — not only of the CTA itself, but of your brand as a whole.

2. They Don’t Call Users to Action

One thing the vague “Click here” and “Buy now” CTAs have going for them: They start with a strong, specific action verb. “Click” and “buy” are concrete actions. They’re something readers can do.

Unfortunately, many calls to action are, technically speaking, not a call to action at all. They may provide information, but they don’t ask the reader to do anything, Billy McCaffrey writes at WordStream.

For instance, while “our latest white paper is available here” is great information, it doesn’t tell users what to do with that information. Users who know how to download your white papers or who have done so before may motivate themselves to download this one, but first-time readers may not want to figure out the process.

Worse, they may not feel as if the white paper is for them — that they have been specifically invited to download it for their own use.

3. They’re Unreadable

A call to action won’t be followed if it isn’t read. And when users typically spend mere seconds on a web page, the quicker they spot the call to action the more likely they are to follow it.

Yet many calls to action are so poorly designed, it’s almost as if the business doesn’t really want people to find them. Placing your CTA out of sequence with the decision-making process, crowding it out with other elements or using a color scheme that blends in with other page elements are three of the top mistakes that cause a call to action to disappear into the ether, according to Aaron Agius at Entrepreneur.

4. They’re in the Wrong Context

CTAs are expected in certain media, like marketing emails and social media ads. In others, however, they end up cheapening your content and actually driving customers away, Jonathan Greene writes at Medium, where he argues CTAs don’t belong.

“If you think your greatest value from writing on Medium comes from profit, you are wrong,” Greene says. “The greatest value of your action on Medium is inspiring others.” Slapping a call to action on that inspiration implies that you’re not there to help or uplift, but that you want something in return.

“No piece of content will ever be more artistically successful with a call to action at the end of it,” Green noted.

Lessons From Failure: How to Make Bad CTAs Better

If it does nothing else, a call to action should call readers to act. The action called for should be strong, be specific and engage the use of the body in some way, even if it’s only to click a button or link.

Why?

According to Leo Widrich at Buffer, action words trigger the brain’s motor cortex. When the brain encounters strong action verbs, it experiences itself not only reading a word, but actually following through on the action.

And the stronger the verb, the stronger the sensation of action. “Read” and “learn,” as primarily mind-based activities, produce a relatively weak motor cortex response. “Stand,” “search” and even “click,” as movement-based activities, produce a much stronger one.

A strong, commanding action verb makes readers’ brains experience the action you call for even before they do it, which greatly increases the chances they’ll take the next step.

Beyond the copy, here are four things you can start doing today to improve your CTAs, boost click-through rates and ultimately drive more conversions.

1. Marry Content With Design

Rounded conversion buttons set off with white space and in contrasting colors from the remainder of the page also get more attention than their more square, crowded or drab counterparts, says Agius. In addition, high-quality images that support the goal of your call to action can help. Just make sure these images don’t compete with the CTA itself.

According to Steve Young at Unbounce, testimonials and case studies near a CTA can increase conversion rates by 68.7 percent — but only if they’re the right kind of testimonials and case studies. Look for short, snappy copy that’s “both believable and impressive,” says Agius.

2. Think Long(er) Term

When you’re generating or contributing content to a platform like Medium, Greene recommends limiting your CTAs to links to other Medium pieces you’ve done, to your main website or to an email list.

From the website or email list, you can start drawing in potential customers.

To some, this sounds counterintuitive: How do more steps lead to more conversion? Here, it’s because you’re building on the reader’s existing interest, inspiration or investment. The original article creates that sense of emotional and intellectual connectedness. The journey to your website or email list continues it.

3. Personalize Your Content

In early 2018, HubSpot’s Jeffrey Vocell ran a study that looked at more than 300,000 CTAs. The CTAs he considered fell into one of three buckets:

Basic CTAs

Multivariate CTAs that were being split-tested)

Smart CTAs that responded dynamically to viewer locations, browser languages and many other user variables

What he found wasn’t surprising: The smart CTAs convert much better than the others. Dynamic CTAs that can speak to someone’s unique profile convert at about twice the rate of other CTAs.

Why such a profound uptick in conversions? Because smart CTAs let you serve someone “serving them content that reflects their current level of interest and knowledge on the subject,” Vocell writes.

“Blog posts and web pages might cater to multiple audiences at the same time, but if they all have the same CTA on them regardless of who’s reading, you’re neglecting various portions of your audience — those people who are either too advanced for what you’re offering, or aren’t advanced enough to need it yet. Smart CTAs accommodate for these differences across the buyer’s journey.”

If you’re interested in trying out dynamic, smart CTAs, here are a few marketing automation tools you should know:

HubSpot is one of the go-to platforms for personalized marketing. If you have the budget, it has several features that will let you personalize calls to actions on your landing pages, on your blog posts, in your emails and on other digital assets.

4. Test Your CTAs

As you can imagine, there are scores of variables that go into someone’s decision to click “Buy Now” or “Learn More” buttons. That’s why split-testing your CTAs is so important.

“There is indeed a magic formula for creating CTAs that convert,” Robin Nichols writes at AB Tasty. “Test, test and test again. In the real world, behind every successful campaign, every effective call-to-action, are dozens or even hundreds of A/B test runs.”

In general, the variables worth testing break into five categories, Elana Chiari writes at MailUp. Those include:

Color. Think back to what Agius recommended about button design. Does it make sense to change a red button to a green one? Test that hypothesis.

Size. “The button should be large enough to be noticeable, but an excessive size may be too aggressive and detrimental to the user experience,” Chiari writes. Run a test to find out where that “too aggressive line is.”

Position. On landing pages, it’s usually a good idea to have your CTA above the fold. In a blog post, it might make sense to have a newsletter signup at the end of the post, or perhaps someone in the middle of the copy. Test those possibilities to find out what works best

Copy. In Agius’ piece, he points to a study that found changing a CTA from “Get Your Membership” to the more specific “Find Your Gym and Get Membership” resulted in 213 percent more clicks.

Two of the best tools for getting started with A/B testing are Optimizely and VWO.

How to Say What You Mean in a CTA

Your CTA should call readers to a specific action. But how exactly do you call for the right action at each point of the sales funnel? “Any CTA is better than no CTA,” says Neil Patel, “but it helps if you have a strategy that propels leads deeper into, not out of, your sales funnel.”

Every SaaS company wants to captivate (and convert) potential customers, but the way to do so isn’t always intuitive, especially at the top of the sales funnel.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common CTAs seen throughout the funnel and how well they do their job.

‘Follow Us on Social!’

This CTA is one of the most popular ways to draw potential customers closer. It appeals to the 50 percent of qualified leads who aren’t ready to make a purchase decision while encouraging them to stay in touch via social media.

Here, the CTA starts with a strong action verb, “follow.” It includes some specifics (follow us). It even tells the visitor where they’ll be doing the following … sort of.

Where does this link lead? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, another page listing all those options? To boost the rate at which visitors click this CTA, make sure they know exactly which social media platform they’re getting when they do. Something like “Follow Us on Twitter!” would do the job.

Or punch it up even further. Serial entrepreneur Jeremy Smith recommends using a call to action that implies the person clicking is becoming part of a story that only gets better. Here, that option might read “Join Us on Facebook!” or “Continue the Journey on Twitter!”

‘Download Our [Lead Magnet]’

Ebooks, white papers, worksheets, info packets: The list of potential lead magnets is endless, but these tools are only valuable to you or to prospective contacts if they’re actually downloaded.

“Download Our Ebook” asks for a bit more involvement from the visitor than a social media like or follow. Here, you’re asking them to commit sufficient interest to want that ebook, white paper or other free prize in your digital box of cereal.

So, how do you convert “I’ll click Like on Facebook” visitors to “I’ll read this free ebook” visitors?

Lilach Bullock recommends involving your visitors in the CTA directly by letting them “speak” through a CTA in the first person. “Download Our Ebook” invites them to take a step, but “Send Me My Free Ebook Today” puts them in the position of asking to participate in that step. And because asking signals buy-in, it also encourages buy-in.

‘Free Trial’

As a CTA, this one…isn’t. There’s no verb at all, much less an actionable verb. Sure, visitors love adjectives like “free” and nouns like “trial,” both of which offer them the chance to make their own decisions about value without requiring a commitment. But what do you want your visitor to do?

Despite its weaknesses, “Free Trial” is still one of the most popular CTAs out there. To improve its conversion power, focus on clarifying exactly what your visitor gets when they click it, Patel recommends.

‘Free 30 Days’

“Free 30 Days” suffers from many of the same defects as “Free Trial,” but it has one difficulty all its own: It threatens to deposit the user at a credit card information form they aren’t prepared to fill out, either because they don’t have their card handy or because they don’t want to share that much information.

The result? Often, a quick click of the back button and a moment of revulsion.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In December 2017, Amazon introduced its app users to a swipe-based 1-Click checkout, as Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reports. The swipe bar contained the CTA “Swipe to buy with 1-Click.”

The results? Approval, not only for the swipe function itself but also for the CTA. Amazon shoppers knew exactly what would happen if they swiped.

Use that same level of specificity if you want users to land on a payment page in the right moment.

‘Buy Now’

Here, the value is in being placed alongside a less commitment-heavy CTA, e.g. “Start your free trial.” Part of what made Amazon’s 1-Click so popular, notes Perez, is that users not only knew what they were getting by swiping, but they could also discern how it differed from clicking “Add to Cart.”

Users in a hurry could 1-click, while those who intended to buy but wanted to browse still had the cart option. Win-win.

If You Forget Everything Else, Remember This

To turn your call to action into customer action:

Use short, strong, concrete action verbs.

Design for visibility and appeal.

Place your call to action with the user’s decision-making process.

And let your own taste be your guide. If you’re intrigued and excited by your CTA’s design, placement and wording, your audience likely will be, too.

We sometimes lose sight of how much data we as a species are currently producing. A little perspective: A 2017 IBM Marketing Cloud Survey estimated that 90 percent of all human data had been generated in the preceding 24 months.

Content marketing probably represents a significant portion of that data. Nearly every business with an online presence engages in some form of content creation or content marketing, and many have made content marketing a core part of their overall marketing strategy.

When your company isn’t seeing results from those efforts, though, it can feel like you’re just throwing content into an ever-growing pile.

It may be time for a better content strategy.

One option? Customer surveys.

Many SaaS companies eschew customer surveys because they feel like more work with little payoff. After all, you have customers’ behavior data. You know what they clicked, what they paid for and whether they came back. That’s plenty to work from, right?

Not so, says Colleen Jones at Content Marketing Institute. Behavioral data only tells you what people actually did. Iit doesn’t explain who those people are, what they think about your brand or services, or why they took the actions they did.

It also doesn’t tell you what they did before or after their contact with your content.

It doesn’t even tell you why they ended up on your website in the first place.

Go To the Source: How to Solicit Information (and From Whom)

“The purpose of content is to build the relationship between the business and the buyer,” notes an article at The Daily Egg. And it’s easier to build relationships when you know something about the person you’re seeking to connect with.

SaaS companies in particular understand the value of relationship-building, since software as a service isn’t a one-time transaction. Done well, it builds longstanding partnerships.

Building relationships with the right decision makers is key. If your company offers software as a service aimed at accounting for mid-sized construction businesses, for instance, effective content marketing should reach the people who work for mid-sized construction businesses and who have some influence there over the accounting process.

While basic demographic information can give you a broad overview of your audience, it doesn’t always translate into actionable marketing insights, as Jebbit cofounder Jonathan Lacoste notes at Inc. For instance, while you may know that most of your social media followers are women ages 25 to 40, that data doesn’t tell you why those women like your brand or what they’re looking for.

Naturally, you could go to each of these visitors and ask them to dive into a survey. But to do that, you’ll need to know how best to reach them and how to present the survey in a way they’re most likely to respond to.

And if you knew that, half the survey questions would be moot.

What’s the answer? According to Katrina Pfannkuch at Kapost, it may be time to build buyer personas. Liz O’Neill Dennison offers three steps to understanding the people you want to reach and how to reach them:

Review and use visitor information you already have.

Ask established customers about their process.

Draw a map of the motivations, questions, needs and behaviors that potential customers are most likely to bring to your content.

Once you have these details in mind, it’s easier to spot places in which customer surveys about more specific topics — from the value of your content to their impressions of a particular interaction or service — will allow you to dig one level deeper into improving your content.

[img: phone.jpg]

You Can’t Know What You Don’t Ask: How to Choose the Right Questions

Once you know who you want to reach and where to get their attention, it’s time to decide what you want to ask. After all, you can’t get the right answers — those that will be most effective for your marketing goals — by asking the wrong questions.

Some of the most common right questions SaaS content marketing teams ask are:

What do people think of your content and your brand? In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Frank V. Cespedes and Russ Heddleston note that the average time users spend viewing content is 2 minutes, 27 seconds. Customers’ impressions of your content and brand develop in this time — and knowing what those impressions are can tell you how quickly you’re engaging potential buyers.

Why do people respond to a certain piece of content? Jones recounts a story of a client who saw 10 percent of its videos driving 90 percent of its traffic. Naturally, the client wanted to replicate the successful elements of that 10 percent — but they had no idea why those particular videos were so effective. Behavioral data showed what was happening, but not why.

How did the content change a person’s decisions or behavior? Cespedes and Heddleston found that, for B2B buyers, good case studies led to a higher purchase rate because buyers could see what other businesses achieved with the product or service. Surveys can help you determine exactly how content gets transformed into behavior, allowing you to focus on the content that drives the actions you want.

With your questions in mind, it’s time to design a survey.

First, don’t make it too long. IZEA emphasizes the interactive nature of customer surveys, and for good reason: According to Kevin McSpadden at Time, the average attention span for Internet users is eight seconds.

Eight seconds is tough when you’re trying to communicate core product, service or brand ideas. But it’s actually great for surveys.

Every time a new questions appears, the eight-second clock resets — as long as the questions are well-designed. And designing questions to fit both customers’ engagement needs and companies’ data needs is easier than many SaaS companies realize.

That said, it’s best to limit the questions you ask. And let customers know in advance how many you’ll be asking so they don’t quit in frustration before the end.

Once the survey is ready to go, place a clear call to action in an opportune place. For instance, if you want feedback on a particular video, place a link at the end of the video or in the video description. To ask questions about particular products or services, consider placing a call to action and link to the survey at the bottom of blog posts that focus on that product or service.

Have you created a survey but gotten no responses? Offering an incentive, like a small discount or freebie, can encourage greater participation. Get creative!

[img: lightbulb.jpg]

Have Data, Will Market: How to Transform Survey Answers Into Intel

In addition to choosing which questions to ask, you’ll also need to consider how to ask them. “Surveying is a strong quantitative methodology when used correctly,” says Jones.

For instance, closed-ended questions about the past tend to generate more useful data. Many people enthusiastically state what they will do, but when the opportunity appears they don’t do what they said they would.

Instead, ask questions about what customers did. “Did you recommend our services?” will gather more useful information about word of mouth than “Would you recommend our services?”

Many seemingly open-ended questions can be turned into closed-ended questions in a survey. For example, instead of asking “What do you think about our service?” and providing a text box for typed responses, consider asking “Which of the following statements best describes your impression of our service?” and providing three to five answer options.

Don’t shy away from online survey creation tools. Tools like SurveyMonkey allow you to create several different types of questions for free, with the option to upgrade to a paid account if you want access to a fuller range of tools.

The Bottom Line

According to a study by CoBloom, 11 percent of the world’s largest SaaS companies in 2017 didn’t even have a blog, while 60 percent of the top-performing companies blogged about educational or news topics. Thirty-six percent of SaaS blogs had no clear call to action.

Content marketing is a wide-open field for SaaS providers. But, as with any form of marketing, content works best when it’s tailored to the people you want and need to build relationships with. Well-designed surveys provide an opportunity to build those connections.

A robust content marketing strategy typically comes after a brand has established its identity. That identity is the rudder that steers the brand in everything it says and does.

However, sometimes an established brand needs an image refresh or rebrand. With all the digital tools available today, content can help lead that change.

UK branding firm Fabrik explains the difference between a refresh and rebrand this way: “While a brand refresh is like giving your company a fresh lick of paint, a new look, and a fancy new logo, ‘rebranding’ is all about tearing down everything you’ve built, and starting again from scratch.”

We would add that these changes are not aesthetic only — they also speak to the focus of your content.

Marketing agency Rattleback offers questions to ask when considering whether you need a refresh or a comprehensive rebrand. You might consider a refresh or rebrand if:

Your brand identity has changed. Perhaps you have new service offerings and new business objectives, or you’ve outgrown an outdated positioning and need to remain relevant.

Your audience is evolving. Perhaps you are targeting a new audience, or your existing audience has changed.

External factors have impacted your brand or business. Perhaps you had a PR crisis, or technology has created new competition.

No matter why or how your brand changes, make sure you don’t alienate loyal customers by changing so much that you become unrecognizable. Lindsay Kolowich at Hubspot has a great post about developing an identity and translating it into marketing. “A brand is one of the most valuable assets of a business, and it needs to be carefully crafted to ensure it properly and authentically represents the business,” she says.

Fresh brand identities also call for new campaigns. With these examples, we want to demonstrate the benefits of leading with your content strategy.

Personalize Complex Industries

Content is the No. 1 way to assert your brand’s relevance to any audience. The following companies demonstrate how content can personalize even the most complex industries.

Example: General Electric

Electricity, lighting, energy and transportation are not the easiest industries to relate to, but the 125-year-old engineering company is challenging that. By focusing on the power of science, technology and innovation, General Electric has set the standard for content marketing.

“We’re a company that does things that are complex and difficult, so finding ways to describe them in a way that’s simple and engaging is quite important,” says CMO Linda Boff.

One memorable way GE did that was through the Owen campaign. Owen was a fictitious industrial internet developer hired at GE. As the content showed the new college grad trying to explain his job to friends and family, the campaign was able to humanize the industry.

GE recruitment increased by 800 percent the following year.

The company leverages its unique content on nearly every channel possible. That includes Facebook Live coverage of drones visiting GE factories, a content hub that explores topics like ending power outages, and even science-fiction comic books.

Takeaway: Good content can make seemingly complicated topics relevant and interesting to just about anyone.

Example: Hewlett-Packard

Technology writer Liz Alton notes that B2B companies in industries like IT have to establish authority and take on big issues. However, it’s also important to remember that IT teams are made up of real people.

With their digital publication Tektonika, Hewlett-Packard demonstrates that you can be human even when talking about serious, technical topics. Just look at how they describe Tektonika: “Whether you’re looking for a fresh take on the hottest tech or searching for ways to lock down your IT environment from hackers, Tektonika is sure to provide a sharp perspective — with a smirk.”

Takeaway: It is possible to be entertaining and human when talking about technical topics.

Reach New Audiences

Content is also a great way to reach specific audiences and people who might not know (or care about) your brand otherwise.

Example: Urban Outfitters

While London Fashion Week is usually exclusive to high-fashion brands, retailer Urban Outfitters decided to take part in the conversation using content. They collaborated with Centrefold, a limited-edition magazine that showcases well-known and emerging artists in the fashion and design industries.

Urban Outfitters commissioned a special issue of the magazine to celebrate Fashion Week and showcase the brand’s support of art and fashion. The brand’s Multimedia Creative Director Nabil Aliffi told Dscoop.com: “This creative concept, eye-opening content and outstanding digital print capabilities enabled Urban Outfitters to leave a mark and express its promise of youth and beauty.”

Takeaway: This demonstrates how a brand can connect with a new, relevant audience using one piece of content.

Example: Telekom

German mobile phone company Telekom (which does business in the US under the brand T-Mobile) has been creating quality content for years. The company’s digital magazine Electronic Beats explores the world’s electronic music scene and is a respected brand in its own right. Its digital presence has expanded to include a podcast series, social media channels and ElectronicBeats.TV.

The Content Marketing Association makes an important point in its review of Electronic Beats: The brand only promotes Telekom subtly, by using the logo and colors in the design. “Given that Electronic Beats has been around for so long…it is clearly working for the telecoms brand in engaging a young, tech savvy, music-loving audience.”

Takeaway: Telekom exemplifies how cool content can impact an audience that likely would not think about the company otherwise.

Join Competitors on the Map

Content has the power to pull your brand out of a downturn — or even put you on the map for the first time.

Example: LEGO

It would be remiss not to mention the LEGO movies. While LEGO is one of the top toy companies in the world today, Jonathan Ringen reminds us that the company was near bankruptcy just a few years ago.

With the 2014 release of The LEGO Movie, the company surged past Mattel to become the world’s biggest toy manufacturer. Combined with The LEGO Batman Movie, the films have made nearly $800 million in the box office alone. The movies have not only put the company back on top — with more on the way, the LEGO franchise is just getting started.

The Mission writes a detailed assessment of why The LEGO Movie’s content did so well. The movie understands LEGO stakeholders and other brands’ successes, is open-ended and leverages a timeless narrative without preaching to viewers.

Takeaway: While creating full-length films for the big screen is a pretty lofty task, LEGO has proved that the sky’s the limit when it comes to branded content.

Example: Iceland

Iceland has not always been the tourism destination it is today. That changed seven years ago when the country’s tourism sites launched an integrated campaign, which included some very thoughtful content marketing.

The “Inspired by Iceland” video series really put Iceland on many travelers’ maps. That series features more than 100 videos of dignitaries explaining why Iceland inspires them. They showcase the country’s beautiful scenery and unique culture, and explain exactly how to navigate barriers to visiting.

They also include clear invitations to explore the country guided by Icelanders.

The content was fun and even humorous, but most importantly it showed viewers exactly why they should visit Iceland — and how to do so. More than 2.2 million visitors passed through Iceland in 2017 as a result. That’s more than four times the number of visitors who passed through in 2010.

Takeaway: Skyword sums up why the Iceland campaign was so successful. “It wasn’t enough to simply suggest that Iceland was unique, adventurous and interesting — but rather, it was by suggesting that visitors themselves could become a bit more unique, adventurous and interesting that Iceland was able to successfully bring in a huge wave of tourism.”

Respond to an Evolving Landscape

Changing a logo or using new colors will not make industry issues disappear. However, content can play an important role in guiding your company through them.

Example: Coca-Cola

In late 2012, the Coca-Cola Company replaced its corporate website with Coca-Cola Journey, a digital magazine with original and curated content. This came as global health concerns around topics like obesity and sugar were beginning to impact consumers’ perception of the company.

The new site offered feel-good stories and branded content, but it also addressed issues head-on in areas like health and the environment.

By doubling down on content, Coca-Cola reaped several additional benefits. For example, around the same time Journey launched, the company set a moonshot goal to grow its social channels by 50 percent per year. They did much better than that, though: Coca-Cola’s social channels grew by 100 percent every year for three subsequent years.

Ashley Brown was the director of digital communications and social media when the platform launched. “I realized moonshot goals matter, because — as the saying goes — even if you miss, you land among the stars.”

Takeaway: Content platforms are key to communicate your company’s point of view during difficult times.

Example: McDonald’s

Around the same time, health concerns were also impacting McDonald’s. In response, the team in Canada decided to address myths and misconceptions surrounding the company’s food. “Our food. Your questions” began with a YouTube video and dedicated website where consumers could submit questions about topics such as ingredient quality and sourcing.

The company answered thousands of them.

The transparency campaign spread beyond Canada to Australia and eventually the US, and is still online today. At one point, McDonald’s even created digital content by sending mythbuster Grant Imahara to visit suppliers and restaurants around the country. The campaign was covered by reporters like Maureen Morrison at Ad Age, and many praised it for redefining transparency.

Takeaway: With new options and calorie counts on menus, McDonald’s has started responding to health concerns in the United States and abroad. Content cannot replace core changes like these, but it can demonstrate that your company is serious about an issue.

Always Gather Data and Feedback

We will leave you with two important principles to remember when refreshing your image or rebranding:

Check your audience data. With the amount of information available today, there is no reason to make strategy changes without first consulting data. Doug Randall, the founder of narrative analytics agency Protagonist, emphasizes this point by showing how data could help Harley-Davidson with a brand refresh.

Whatever you plan to do, test it first. No one wants to end up like Airbnb when they launched a new logo that closely imitated another brand and was compared to human body parts. If you missed it a few years ago, brand marketer Dave Vinjamuri recaps that debacle and what to do if something similar happens to you.

It’s predicted that 80 percent of the world’s internet traffic will be video by 2019.

Think about that — that’s a lot of video content.

In our series Digital Marketing is Interwoven, we have covered how a variety of trends impact content marketers. For example, we recently examined how video is a social media trend. But video is clearly not just a trend.

So, we wanted to focus on video as a medium for content marketing. The numbers clearly show how important this conversation is.

There’s another reason we’re taking this approach. Research shows that consumers are more likely to watch and share videos that are humorous, educational or related to a social cause. Other research says customer testimonials, tutorial videos and demos perform best. Emotional, inspirational, explainer, how-to and behind-the-scenes videos also do well.

Do you get the sense that there are a lot of different research findings out there?

While certain types of videos perform better than others on average, generalizing what will work best for your brand and audience doesn’t work at all.

As with all content marketing, what works for you will depend on a variety of factors — starting with the conversion funnel.

Create a Video Strategy for Stages in the Conversion Funnel

Rather than focus on what research shows is the most popular type of video, create a strategy based on your different audiences and where they are in the conversion funnel.

Awareness

In the initial stage, your target audience is becoming aware of a problem or opportunity, but they are not yet familiar with your brand.

Unsurprisingly, the best awareness videos are those that get noticed. You are not yet seeking conversions at this stage, so it’s OK to focus on videos that just entertain. Watch time and shares are good success metrics to consider.

It should go without saying, but it’s vital that these videos are well-branded, even if they are not promotional. Many videos are deemed successful for their humor or entertainment value even though no one associates them with their brand.

If you are creating a video to introduce your company, limit it to between 30 and 60 seconds. Consumers are willing to watch longer videos if they help with purchase decisions or offer entertainment, news or educational content, but more on video length later.

Consideration

Now your audience is actively looking for solutions to their problem, or for an opportunity. At this stage, offer practical value. Prove that you are an expert and show how you can help them solve that problem.

The best videos at this stage are tutorials, explainer videos, how-tos and webinars. In addition to view time and shares, engagement is a helpful metric. Consider whether viewers clicked on a link in the video to learn more, for example.

Conversion

Your audience has chosen how they want to approach their problem or opportunity. They know what they are looking for, and they are narrowing down their options to make a decision.

Your audience needs to know why they should choose you over a competitor, so give them reasons with case studies, testimonials and demos. You can also use videos that show your authority, such as expert interviews.

Several studies — such as this one from Pixability — also show that cause-related content can help with conversion and retention.

Retention

Once you have the conversion, you also want to keep your target audience coming back. Their social media connections will see if they engage with your content, thus making them ambassadors for your brand.

Live and behind-the-scenes videos best serve this purpose. You can also consider employee testimonials to showcase your company culture.

Video platform Wistia offers more details about video content at each stage in the conversion funnel, including metrics and examples of videos at each.

Live and Personalized? No Brainer. Branded Series? Maybe.

As you create your video marketing strategy, there are three types of videos worth considering.

Personalize the Experience

The average retention rate of personalized videos is 35 percent higher than non-personalized videos, according to Vidyard. So, it’s no surprise that 70 percent of video professionals surveyed by HapYak said they are doing some degree of personalization.

Marketers today can offer customers more relevant, personalized and actionable content paths at all stages of the lifecycle, says HapYak VP of Marketing Lisa Clark.

For example, in 2016 Lancôme adapted a product launch video strategy to target six distinct groups. As a result, 32 different messages achieved an 80 percent view-through rate. They also received more than 12,000 requests for samples.

Guy Atzmon at video marketing platform SundaySky believes that personalized video is only starting to live up to its potential.

“Imagine the possibilities: Facebook unveils a new feature to users through a personalized video that educates them on how to use it based on their most likely application, as determined by previous behaviors. Or a user logs into Facebook for the first time after a hiatus from the site, triggering Facebook to deliver a personalized video recapping what he or she has missed.”

Tips:

Google tools let you deliver personalized messages based on historical data and live insights. For example, Groupon has used data to target “people who frequently visit salons,” “live event enthusiasts” and “department store shoppers.”

Live Videos Will Live On

People devote more attention to live video. On average, viewers will spend three times as much time watching a live video as they would a similar prerecorded video.

Consider behind-the-scenes tours, interviews, event coverage and product reveals. Content should encourage engagement — you can do this by using a Q&A format, for example. You should also consider whether to make your content available after the live event or keep it exclusive to those who watched in real time.

Resources:

There are a few tools that can make shooting, publishing and promoting live video easier:

Crowdcast allows you to stream on multiple social platforms at the same time.

Branded Video Series: Here to Stay?

Some brands have created branded video series, and rightfully so: 64 percent of consumers make a purchase after watching branded social videos, according to Tubular Insights.

Research by Contently, however, questions whether branded video series will become a reliable marketing tool. They found that trailers had five times more views than the average episode in a series, suggesting that initial enthusiasm may not trickle down to results.

We are curious to see whether branded series continue as a trend. At the moment, we see it primarily working for brands with established audiences and big budgets.

The Mission offers a few examples of branded content series. For more, you can also check out the winners of the Shorty Awards category for best branded series.

Tips:

Don’t start every video in a series with the same sequence, says Peter Gerard, formerly of Vimeo.

Extract pieces of the story so audiences dig deeper, says Cramer, a global brand experience agency. For example “if your video’s character is shown playing a video game, release that game. If your character is referencing a study, release that study.”

Layer your characters across your marketing assets, “from ads to emails, posters to signage, voicemail greetings to downloadable ringtones.” Cramer adds that your audiences have a relationship with your characters when video is done right, so keep them around.

Best Practices in Video Design

As humans collectively, our patience is dwindling.

Animoto says the ideal video length is up to one minute, with viewing figures falling off dramatically after that point — especially on mobile.

While the ideal length varies by channel and objective, here are some interesting data points that HubSpot’s Clifford Chi found:

Instagram’s most-commented videos tend to be about 26 seconds long.

Twitter’s #VideoOfTheDay tends to be 43 seconds long.

Facebook users will spend up to 1 minute watching a video.

YouTube users will stay engaged for about 2 minutes (but get your call to action in early, says Trepoint founder and CEO Bill Carmody, who recommends slotting at CTA at the 30-second mark).

Snapchat publishes its own best practices for marketers and advertisers. This platform above all others will test your ability to be concise. The company recommends keeping ads shorter than 6 seconds, and to get your branding in before the 2-second mark.

Live video is the exception to these rules. Facebook Live’s captivation times are reportedly 20 minutes on average, according to Falcon.io.

Finally, keep in mind that Ideal length also depends on the type of video. As we mentioned earlier, consumers will spend more time on educational content than a brand introduction, for example.

Tips:

Keep your introductory text crisp. Buzzsumo found that the best Facebook videos had short introductory text, with a median of 61 characters.

Catch attention and get to the point immediately. Gerard’s post, mentioned above, offers great examples of brands doing this well.

Video tech company Vydia recommends creating a “trailer” for channels like Instagram if your videos are longer than 30 seconds. Include a call-to-action within the video or description prompting users to watch the full video.

Designing for video isn’t just about length. For example, square (1:1 aspect ratio) and vertical (9:16) videos are overtaking the conventional horizontal videos (16:9) thanks to mobile. In fact, people are 67 percent more likely to watch the full length of a square-oriented video than they are to watch a horizontal one.

Finally, we’ll leave you with a few bonus tips for designing video content:

Switching to new frames and animating your graphics is a great way to keep your audience engaged, adds Vydia.

Many viewers don’t have autoplay features turned on, so custom thumbnails are important. Shareablee found that their best videos displayed the top four images from the video and in a grid.

Viewers watch 85 of Facebook videos without sound, so adding captions is a must. This also helps with SEO.

The internet is saturated with content about creating content. After all, that’s what content marketers do for a living.

We have seen plenty of guides for software-as-a-service startups that want to attract users with smart content. However, there is less information for established SaaS companies that have a content foundation and want to take it to the next level.

This guide is for mature SaaS companies that want to speak to their core users, build awareness among potential users and speak to topics outside their primary offering. It’s designed so SaaS marketers can envision how next-level content can support their growth goals.

Learn to Target Multiple Audiences

Perhaps you are expanding to enterprises in addition to small businesses, to customers in different roles or into a new industry. Buffer’s Guide to Marketing Personas is a great resource to create personas for this new audience.

Depending on the audience and availability of your own data, you may need additional resources to create these personas. Plenty of tools companies can help. For example, you can use SEMRush or ahrefs to analyze a competitor’s target market.

When you build content, remember that each piece should focus on only one audience. That said, Stoney deGeyter at Search Engine Journal offers examples of subtle ways you can still speak to others, such as through calls to action in microcopy. At the end of the day, though, those who are most likely to buy your product or service should always take priority.

You may find that you need more than one site to address different audience needs. For example, Hubspot has three blogs for their different personas: marketing, sales and customer success. That doesn’t mean they create three times the content; they often write similar but slightly different posts on topics that are relevant to all three audiences. Natalie Burg at Contently also has a great case study on this with her post “4 Keys to Capturing a New Audience for Your Content Marketing.”

The next step is to sketch out those various audience members’ journeys. Here are a few resources to get you started:

Percolate’s content marketing strategy manual is an example of how an enterprise platform created value for its key audience: content marketers.

Marcia Riefer Johnston, managing editor for the Content Marketing Institute, offers a useful article and template on why and how to map your audience’s journey when creating your strategy.

Automation makes segmented communications easier than ever. With a tool like MailChimp, you can send personalized emails based on a variety of data, such as a person’s role within a company or their response to previous communications.

Think Beyond the Sales Funnel

Many content marketers focus on the purchase funnel model and transactional goals like sales. LinkedIn’s Daniel Hochuli notes the problem with this model is it doesn’t account for the fact that some of our audience just wants to consume content. They aren’t interested in the product.

Hochuli offers a second model that focuses on content as a product, which might include hosting paid events and webinars, or selling ad space and paid subscriptions, for example.

Creating relevant content outside of your niche is also a great way to reach and build credibility with new audiences — and often much larger ones. This, in turn, can generate high-authority backlinks to your site and boost your search engine rankings. Marketing Land columnist Andrea Lehr calls this “tangential content” because it’s only somewhat related to your product or service rather than being more heavily branded.

For an example of what this looks like, consider HubSpot again. Their article on how to use Excel ranks No. 2 in Google’s SERPS for that keyword — only behind Microsoft — which means that piece of content reaches their primary target audience as well as countless others.

Pull Together the Tools and Data Needed to Inform your Content

Content marketers told the Content Marketing Institute that creating better and more engaging content is the biggest challenge they face. But the team at Automizy makes a great point: As a cloud-based solution, you have an advantage because you can track every step your users take. Not only can this help you target your primary audience, but it can also inform your communication to others.

You can also look at your data to see how to improve the stories you are already telling. Have you found that video performs well? Perhaps you could document a customer’s journey, or interview someone those videos have helped.

Salesforce is a great example of SaaS content marketing done well. One of the big lessons that company has learned, according to Katie Dufficy, is that culture posts performs well, which tells her that Salesforce’s audience is interested in Salesforce as a company, not just as a vendor.

Contently’s Joe Lazauskas recommends Optimizely and Funnel Envy for gathering actionable insights from your content. These have helped Contently more than double conversions on e-book offers.

Publishing original research and content can be a great way to reach new audiences and get your content shared widely. Karola Karlson points to this post from Ahrefs as a great example of how actionable research can bring “near-magical results.”

Keyword research can also tell you a lot about what your new audience will care about.

Remember that earlier example of HubSpot’s Excel how-to guide? They created that guide after realizing how many people searched for that topic, and now they get significant traffic from it.

SaaS Companies With Content To Admire

Cobloom’s report on the State of SaaS Content Marketing 2017 can tell you what industry leaders are doing and where they see the best results. For example, 87 percent of SaaS blogs attribute content to named authors, so there is clearly value in putting a face and a name behind your brand.

Don’t just follow other SaaS companies, either. Karlson recommends partnering with them, as well. As an example of the power of partnership, she offers an infographic and article she worked on in collaboration with Copy Hackers, Aggregate and Venngage.

Finally, Rocketship Growth has an extensive case study on how Hubspot is a best-in-class example of SaaS content marketing in general. There are countless other SaaS providers with great content marketing, including Moz, Unbounce and KissMetrics.

Getting Started With a New Content Push

Now that you have a plan of attack, you need to assess your capacity to create more content and decide who in your team will take the lead (or, you might need to hire that person).

Then, it’s a matter of understanding whether you should create this content in-house or outsource. The Content Marketing Institute found that nearly three out of every four major organizations outsource their content. If you’re among the 27 percent who keep it in house, check out six tips for running a powerhouse content team from Cognitives.

Hopefully you have read this far because your company leadership already believes in the power of content marketing. But if you need to convince them, remember this: content marketing costs 62 percent less than outbound marketing but generates more than three times as many leads, according to Demand Metric.

However, it’s not just enough to play in the space — it also pays to be the best. Research shows that content marketing leaders experience nearly eight times more site traffic than non-leaders.